Something awful happened today. I read
George
Will’s column and found my head nodding vigorously at several points. Ewwww.

I had pretty much written Will off long
ago, with the possible exception of his baseball columns. But here’s what he
says about the Enron collapse:

It will remind everyone — some conservatives, painfully — that a mature capitalist
economy is a government project. A properly functioning free market system does not
spring spontaneously from society’s soil as dandelions spring from suburban lawns.
Rather, it is a complex creation of laws and mores that guarantee, among much else,
transparency, meaning a sufficient stream — torrent, really — of reliable information
about the condition and conduct of corporations.

Poor Will. That pretty much makes him a Stalinist, as far as his crowd
is concerned. I don’t envy him going through his hate mail bag tomorrow.

One interesting thing Will adds is that “a few capitalists have done more to delegitimize
capitalism than America’s impotent socialist critics ever did or today’s moribund left
could hope to. It is the Republicans’ special responsibility to punish such capitalists.”
(Emphasis mine.) Hmmmm… if I buy that philosophy, then that means we liberals have a special
responsibility to punish those who delegitimize our side.

Well! I am not one to shirk my duty. May I direct your attention to
today’s little
gem from our old friend Charlotte Raven? You might
remember her as the lovely
young lady who, seven days after the Sep. 11 atrocity, informed us primly that
a bully with
a bloody nose is still a bully.

In her latest column, Raven claims that had Charles Bishop been raised in the UK,
he would not have committed suicide by crashing his small plane into a
tall building.

For boys like him, school will always be a nightmare, but there is far more chance
over here that he would meet a like-minded compadre with whom he could share jokes
and swap notes about the monstrous pain of the universe. At some point, they’d discover
the Smiths and both would be delighted by how perfectly Morrissey captures that
feeling of being invisible to the people whose attention you most want to attract.

The… “Smiths”? “Morrissey”…? Why, Ms. Raven, what are these… strange, exotic
bands you speak of? They… confuse and frighten me.

No, I couldn’t agree more. If only we here in the United States had any
kind of outlet at all for our kids with Goth angst. But none exist.
No, Britain is far better at absorbing its misfits in a healthy manner, given
its far more easy-going culture and complete absence of class structure.
I mean, young British misfits
never
do
anything
wrong, do they?

The really amusing part is Raven’s comments on Marilyn Manson — that if
“Marilyn Manson were British he could have had a nice career singing songs
about how it felt to be a sickly, spotty but highly intelligent young man
with a wicked sense of humour and a perfectly comprehensible horror of
the banality and hypocrisy of late-capitalist society.” Could it be…? The
high-and-mighty Charlotte Raven, scourge of warlike capitalist American dullards
everywhere, doesn’t get Marilyn Manson? Any American with any
knowledge of pop culture understands
that Manson is nothing more than an off-color over-the-top 24/7
marketing campaign. Could it be that we get the joke and Raven doesn’t?
It’s almost too much.

As an added bonus, Raven
hated
the Lord of the Rings movie (of course!) — but if I understand her
correctly, the movie would have been a success had the special effects been
cheesy. She is quite disappointed with the movie’s seamless CGI:
“The minute Middle Earth is as real to us as Battersea or Burma,
it is no longer Tolkien’s creation… (Jackson’s) literal-minded insistence
on shining a spotlight into every crevice makes the whole thing seem completely
banal. If Hobbits are real, they are laughable.” Oh, dear, dear.

I know, I know. I resolved this year: no more po-mo lefty silliness. But I just
ran across this one. I wasn’t actively trolling through the Guardian
website looking for trouble, I swear. Scout’s Honor.

All right, I’ll end on a positive note. Kathleen Parker pretty much
nails
the CNN-Paula Zahn-zipper promo “controversy” in today’s Merc:

Still, for a nanosecond of offensive flattery, Zahn got the attention the
ad was intended to get, she got to decry the “insult” that she’s an appealing
woman, and she gets weeks of coverage in which her professionalism is praised
amid apologetic admissions that, well, she is a little bit sexy. And
you thought you were having a bad day.

Parker also notes that the zipper sound was inaccurate: “I personally visited
every closet in my house this morning and couldn’t find a single zipper that
made any noise. With little ado, we’ve entered the era of the noiseless zipper.”

The Era of the Noiseless Zipper. What will our nation’s scientific geniuses
think of next?

I really need to stop reading lefty British publications. It’s a bad, bad habit of mine.

Not that this naive American hasn’t learned all sorts of fascinating things
about the United States, the September 11 atrocity, and world politics.
Without the London Review of Books, I would have had
no idea that we had it coming.
Without The Guardian, I wouldn’t have known that we are
merely bullies
with a bloody nose, that
what goes
around comes around, that we need to
dare to damn Israel,
that the body
bags have already started coming home from this new Vietnam, and that unless we cease
the bombing immediately,
we will be
responsible for genocide in Afghanistan. Without
The Independent, I would never have understood
that we are
war criminals,
that we are
barbarians
and cowboys, and that we eschewed face-to-face combat because we thought our troops would be
decimated,
traumatized, and humiliated.

Oh, occasionally you run into
something worth reading.
But mostly it’s just knee-jerk defeatism, anti-Americanism, leavened with the occasional spasm of
virulent anti-Semitism. Huzzah for our closest allies!

I ran across the following G.K. Chesterson snippet a little while ago. I don’t usually quote
works that I haven’t read entirely, but this one just seems sums up the aforementioned writers so well.
I’ll bend the rules this time:

A man who says that no patriot should attack the Boer War until
it is over is not worth answering intelligently; he is saying that no good
son should warn his mother off a cliff until she has fallen over it. But
there is an anti-patriot who honestly angers honest men, and the
explanation of him is, I think, what I have suggested: he is the uncandid
candid friend; the man who says, ‘I am sorry to say we are ruined,’ and
is not sorry at all.

Anyway. I mostly fish through the lefty rags for the same reason I’m compelled to
listen to right-wing talk
radio. I’m looking for the really whacked out stuff. The caller who screams,
“Ya know what I think? I think we need internment camps for liberals!” You
know… something that helps me feel superior and clever.

It’s a counterproductive impulse, obviously. My goal is to
package the Right and the Left into safe little boxes.
See — those people are idiots! But of course that’s not true. For
every Robert Fisk there’s a Christopher Hitchens, or a Salman Rushdie.
For every Michael Savage, there’s a William Safire. For every Barbara Lee,
there’s… well, every other Democratic congressional representative.

The long and short of it is, I’ve found my New Year’s resolution. No more
British po-mo silliness. Or American silliness, for that matter. No more
tossing all liberals into the Idiot Lefty Box, or all conservatives into
the Frothing Right-winger Box. I should know better by now.

Doing some more reading, this time on the
Holy Land Foundation, which had its assets
frozen by the US government a couple of days ago. The group had some
choice words on the matter, calling it an “attack on Islam”, among other things.

Well, today an
FBI memo
came to light, describing various ties between the HLF and Hamas. My favorite part
was the snippet from a 1995 fundraiser in Los Angeles, where a Hamas military leader spoke:

“I hope no one is recording me or taking any pictures, as none are allowed…
because I’m going to speak the truth to you. It’s simple. Finish off the Israelis.
Kill them all! Exterminate them! No peace ever!”

The event raised $207,000, some of which went to reward the families of
suicide bombers. It took us six years to shut these people down?

Ok, let’s turn to some happy news: Enron has now come
begging
us for power.

“We don’t want to dance on anyone’s grave,” said Oscar Hidalgo, spokesman for the California
Department of Water Resources. “But this is sort of ironic.”

Nonsense, Mr. Hidalgo! Dance, I say, dance!

We’re also being treated to a number of sad stories about poor rank-and-file Enron employees,
whose retirement funds melted away as Enron’s stock fell from $90 to
change-under-the-couch-cushion levels. Looks like the
Labor Department is even getting involved. You’ve got to hand it to the U.S. government — even if
you’re a bunch of arrogant manipulative trash-talking middlemen, the plodding old Labor
Department will cheerfully step in to save your ass. That’s duty for you.

But let’s face it. Enron and the other energy traders simply took advantage of the
massive loopholes in our own “deregulation” scheme. We Californians wore a short skirt
and asked for it. After all, in 1995 we allowed ourselves to be distracted by the
burning issues of the day, such as whether or not to provide cheap preventative medical care to
illegal immigrants. Hmmm… sexy issue with lots of people screaming on both sides,
or complex arcane issue involving huge transfers of money and power? Guess which one
penetrated our consciousness? Fortunately, we had plenty of experts (Gov. Wilson,
legislators of both parties, and hordes of industry lobbyists) to decide the tough issues for us.

Not to beat this Enron thing to death, but a few days ago I heard an “industry analyst”
on NPR assuring the public that despite the debacle, energy production would continue.
“Power plants will continue to create electrons,” he said.

Arrrgh. All together, now: power plants don’t create electrons. And
while we’re on the subject, power plants don’t move electrons, either. Neither
do computers. If we’re talking AC power, electrons just shake back and forth. That’s about
it. And DC power? Well, you crack open your Halliday and Resnick and
calculate the electron drift speed for typical values of current and wire diameter. Then
call ZDNet
and let them in on the secret. I’m sure they’ll thank you for it.

I’m going through a “can’t read the news anymore” phase again, after reading up
on the massive wave of suicide bombs going off in Israel. A particularly nice
touch: the Saturday night bombing in Jerusalem had a
second bomb placed and timed to kill panicked, fleeing and injured civilians.
And if that weren’t enough to turn my stomach, check out
this
apologia for the murderers by Peter Preston in the UK’s
The Guardian — published Dec. 3, mere hours
afterwards.

Over the last couple of months, I’ve seen more than one smarmy pundit make the argument
that suicide bombers aren’t cowards. The pundits lecture us that see, there we go again, unthinkingly
slapping people with the label “cowardly”. A “rent-a-response”, as Mr. Preston calls it.
In fact, they tell us the terrorists are very brave — after all, don’t they die too?
Well, sure. Facing their date with paradise and 72 virgins with steely-eyed resolve, no doubt.

Thus we are treated to one of the oldest rhetorical tricks in the book: implicitly
define a term the way you want it to be, and then castigate your
opponents when their definition doesn’t match up favorably with yours.
Mr. Preston, Susan Sontag,
answer me this: how is it that your definition of “bravery” includes murderers of
innocent noncombatants who can’t fight back? Are you somehow muddled about the fact
that the suicide bombers died also? Confusing that for bravery, eh? A rookie
mistake at best. If someone hates his own life and longs for the eternal bliss of
the afterlife, how is he brave if he commits suicide? You’ve got it backwards: it
would be brave of him to to stay alive.

But I should not extend Mr. Preston the courtesy of thinking that perhaps he is
merely muddled — his atrocious timing and poor taste speaks for itself.
In any case, I need to spend less time reading extreme-left wing British
newspapers. There are only so many lectures on morality from Bizarro-world
that you can take in one sitting.

Elana, Adiv: keep yourselves and Mom as safe as possible. I love you always… and
it breaks my heart that the peace you and everyone else in the Middle East deserves
is still yet to be found.